Van Gogh Specialists Identify Three Fakes in Private Collections

The Van Gogh Museum has identified three works attributed to Van Gogh in private collections that are fake, including a painting of a peasant women that sold through Christie’s for nearly $1 million in 2011 and was even previously authenticated by the Amsterdam institution.

Three Van Gogh Museum specialists—Teio Meedendorp, Louis van Tilborgh and Saskia van Oudheusden—shared their findings in the October issue of the Burlington Magazine. The works in question had previously been accepted as authentic in the 1970 catalogue raisonné by Jacob-Baart de la Faille.

For decades, Interior of a Restaurant was considered a second version of an authentic van Gogh, Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris (1887), which is held in a private collection. This was not particularly unusual for the artist, who often made different iterations of his paintings, either as gifts or to experiment.

Interior of a Restaurant appeared in the 1950s, but specialists determined that the brushwork didn’t resemble the original style and that the colors were not a match with the artist’s palette from this time, which includes a Manganese blue synthetic pigment patented in 1935.

There were additional discrepancies among the flowers, with the first depicting autumn begonias and the second painting yellow sunflowers, which would have been past their season when the paintings were made in the late autumn.

The second reported case noted in the article revolves around Head of a Woman, which came from the estate of controversial part-time art dealer Gerbrand Visser who died in 2007. The painting was authenticated the following year by the Van Gogh Museum. In 2011, the same painting, later entitled Head of a Peasant Woman with Dark Cap, was offered at Christie’s New York, where it sold for $993,250.

Though it had been authenticated by the museum before heading to auction, things changed when museum specialists were asked to verify a similar painting of a Nuenen peasant woman that had been submitted by a French owner in 2019.

Subsequent technical research, including an examination of the canvas, the gesso, and the application of the paint, revealed the Christie’s painting to be a forgery carried out between 1902 and 1909, when the original changed hands from the artist’s mother to an inaccessible private collection.

“We take every measure to ensure the authentication of all works consigned for sale, including seeking the expertise by the most eminent experts around the world. The work was authenticated in 2011, having been confirmed as a Van Gogh. As a matter of practice, we cannot comment any further on individual consignments,” a spokesperson from Christie’s told the Art Newspaper.

The third painting in the article, Wood Gatherers in the Snow (1884), came to light in 1912 and was authenticated per the 1970 catalogue, which recorded a sale of the work at Sotheby’s in 1957 by a British businessman, the Earl of Inchcape Kenneth Mackay.

The watercolor was recently rejected by specialists in 2020, who believe the copyist worked from a photograph of the work that was first published in 1904. While painting a Nuenen man, the forger missed a long vertical stick used by Brabant peasants to carry bundles of wood on their backs. A snow-covered farmhouse roof in the background behind the man was also overlooked.